I can't find much reason to alter Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming though, since those books are intended for adults.
I'm inclined to think they do, actually.
Often the revisions soften the weirdness or offensiveness of outdated mores, beliefs and customs, but by blurring them out, you miss a teaching opportunity: explaining how things were, how things are now, and why they changed.
It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.
Is there any indication that children who were read those stories from hundreds of years ago ended up kind, caring, mentally resilient, etc...with whatever traits parents want to instill in their children today?
Always supposing you _can_ still buy a 20th century version. Maybe I wouldn't feel so ambivalent about this editorialising if the editors committed to keeping both versions current
I think we will have no problem finding the 20th century versions.
Just ask a random librarian or archivist how easy it is to find copies of local newspapers from 20+ years ago. Hint: often it's not possible, as the last library trashed its microfiche, in a mistaken belief that someone else surely digitized it already.
> Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not been.
To a degree, yes. But then it's also been long recognized that local newspapers are a critical, extremely valuable window into the past. That alone justifies keeping archived copies - and I'm not talking about filling every libraries full of archival copies of major newspapers, but rather couple institutions keeping microfilms or digitized versions. As it turns out, those institutions end up assuming that the burden of preservation belongs to someone else, and this diffused responsibility leads to those "archived works" being lost forever.
> What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on the used book market would start trending upwards for the 20th century version, and at some point someone would decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the demand.
Maybe, but I'm not sure if this holds in general, even for works of high notoriety. There may be some interest for the old edition, but if the new edition is good enough, there might be too few a people interested in the old one to make a reprint profitable.
Or at least this is how it was before. These days, the cost of storing and delivering digital copies is near-zero, print-on-demand works even for niche works and very small audiences - but there's also so much content that the work could disappear simply because nobody cared about that work in particular enough to bother keeping a copy. Bytes may be cheap, but human attention is not.
Sjimmie (the black kid) also spoke in broken Dutch, and was generally the stupid one.
Even as a 10 year old I recognized it was pretty racist, because I grew up in an environment where this sort of thing is frowned upon.
In the end you can only know about racism if you actually know what it looks like, up close, and without filter. When is too young "too young" for this? I don't know, but I think you're giving children too little credit; they're not entirely stupid. People in the past didn't become racist because of a few books or comics, they became racist due to the general culture at the time, and stuff like this is more a consequence of that than a cause.
(The comic was revamped in the 70s to not be racist by the way, and these new comics were very popular in the 80s and 90s, but the originals were never revised or updated: they just made new, better, non-racist ones.)
It is absolutely fine to tell the kids truth about history, including the fact that these or that popular people were widely cruel, racist or sexist or defrauded or whatever. But that is something completely different then giving the kid fictional story with schematic characters and claim that kid should learn facts about historical society from it.
> It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.
Fun fact: censorship in the past was actually the thing. For example, German censorship during WWI made it unprintable to reference death in kids literature.
Second, quite a lot of what was collected as fairly tales was not intended for toddlers and little four years old children the way we use them. Not just because of violence, they are just not structured for small kids, they are overly long and boring to them. They were for older children, stories then older people/youth told each other for fun. And in the past, what kids were actually pushed into were fairly often educational texts with clear moral learnings.
They did not had movies in the past. There was no Marvel, no Game of Thrones. And quite a lot of these stories are contemporary equivalent of Game of Thrones - except shorter.
It's absurd, it's tacky, and it won't age well.
Often these edits are about preserving the creator's intent. If an author used a word that was inoffensive a hundred years ago and is now offensive, it is more in line with the author's intent to change the word to the modern inoffensive equivalent than to preserve the offensive one that now conveys something different from what it meant to the author.
I would not want my work rewritten in any manner after my death, if still associated with my name. Folks are free to write their own materials that properly reflect their vocabulary values. And if they’re any good, the free market will surely do its work.
Sure, and maybe the author had deeply held beliefs about typefaces and would be appalled that a user can now choose their own typeface on a Kindle. At a certain point, it is a little silly to try to fully understand and preserve every intent of the author. But a character going from good person to a racist due to nothing but the aging of their language is a pretty dramatic alteration of an author's intent that is easy to identify and rectify.
>And if they’re any good, the free market will surely do its work.
Do realize this is exactly what's happening here? These new versions are happening because of capitalistic reasons in that it is harder to sell a book that has a bunch of accidental bigotry in it.
The character is not going from a good person to a racist a due to their language. The character (in my scenario) remains entirely unchanged. What has changed is your (and most modern reader’s) perception of the character.
Which is part of the point. Characters exist in the world they inhabit, not yours or mine or anyone else’s. A huge part of the artistic experience is reinterpreting and reframing the meaning of a work as society develops.
Emotional and moral complexity is a goal in literature, not a bug.
> Do realize this is exactly what's happening here? These new versions are happening because of capitalistic reasons in that it is harder to sell a book that has a bunch of accidental bigotry in it.
Again I must gently disagree. First off, it’s not “accidental bigotry”. It’s bigotry reflective of the time in which it was written. Today in America we find it very difficult to view someone who uses the N word as an unequivocally “good” person. Was that the case in 1830?
Re: publishers releasing revised copies — they’re a business, and business often undercuts artistic intention for a profit. So it goes. If you want to say “I have no problem with rights holders revising (someone else’s) work to which they hold a copyright, to remove challenging remnants of the past and better reflect the vocabulary of today, so they sell better” — I agree 100% that’s well within their rights (however much I dislike that state of affairs).
But please don’t attribute their edits to “preserving authorial intent”. That’s putting (even more) words in the mouths of the dead.
Is this always the intent of the author? Sometimes authors want their characters to live in a world that is identical to ours.
>A huge part of the artistic experience is reinterpreting and reframing the meaning of a work as society develops.
Is this always the intent of the author? Reinterpreting work based on things that occurred since its creation seems to produce and inherent disconnect with what the author intended in the moment.
>Emotional and moral complexity is a goal in literature, not a bug.
Is this always the intent of the author? Not every story needs to be about every complex topic. We don't need to deal with slavery and child abuse for example in a story about a chocolate factory. The book already has its own complex topics that it directly intended to address.
>Again I must gently disagree. First off, it’s not “accidental bigotry”. It’s bigotry reflective of the time in which it was written.
Is this always the intent of the author? Not every author wants their work to be reflective of a specific moment in time. Some stories are meant to be timeless.
>But please don’t attribute their edits to “preserving authorial intent”. That’s putting (even more) words in the mouths of the dead.
You are also putting words in the mouth of the dead by assuming the answer to those above questions. I don't know why one side of this debate gets to claim they speak for the dead with perfect accuracy.
There is only one of us who is suggesting that changing the words in an author’s work after their death is a Good Idea. I am suggesting that the words be left alone entirely, given the objective impossibility of knowing a dead author’s original intent (so ably demonstrated by your excellent use of repetition!).
You desire (or at least accept) altering the original material without regard to the original author’s wishes. That is your right. But such an argument would seem to require justification for the change. Leaving something as is generally does not.
This difference in our positions explains why you perceive me as “speaking for the dead with perfect accuracy” while saying you do not. I am not speaking for the dead. I am letting them speak for themselves and pushing back against those who would alter their message.
You are operating under the assumption that they’d rather their work continue to generate profit for modern businesses, and would accept editing accordingly. Maybe. Maybe not. But boy is it frustrating to hear endless arguments supporting altering existing work to line other people’s pockets, with any suggestion of “write something new, yourself, if it bothers you” being blown off with “this is what they would want”.
Especially grating: the fact that this argument almost always comes out of those who have not generated any such material themselves. Perhaps if they did, they would begin to understand how carefully each word is chosen in any work possessing enough quality to last through the ages.
I.e. preserving historical architecture is not about restoring the building to how we believe it was supposed to be shown - otherwise, the Egyptian pyramids would have gotten back their white finish and gold tip long ago.
Instead, we recognise that those buildings are from a different time and try to highlight the feats of that time that make them remarkable still today.
GP isn't even advocating that. They're advocating redoing the finish with marble, or with frameless glass windows, because that would be the modern equivalent to what those buildings were to people in ancient Egypt.
But perhaps your childhood was different.
These edits (as shown in the article) seem to do more to make good books bad - if the edits enhance sensitivity or not, is an aside.